By Chuck Armsbury, Senior Editor,
The Razor Wire

Ah,
the countryside. If you live in a large city, you dream of getting
away. Just smell the clean air. Hike around, enjoy nature, and
leave behind the congestion. But it's a little different story
if you actually live in the country. Living out in the woods
on ten acres of land depleted of its soil, trees, jobs or other
natural resources can mean crushing poverty. Life in rural America
can be mean, dire and desperate.

Comes now prison expansion to bail out impoverished
rural communities. And what a bailout it is. Large construction
projects, like prisons, are expensive to build no matter how
frugal the design. Whether it's a private or public prison, building
these fenced communities means millions of startup dollars coming
in for local retailers, construction companies and trade unions.
As reported by Newsday (NY) on April 10, 2000, this is what village
officials in Malone, New York had in mind in the 1980s as the
drug war heated up and began filling up the existing prison space
quickly.

Malone is reportedly a beautiful, 19th Century
New England-like town about fifteen miles south of the New York/Quebec
border. The town is dissected by the trout-filled Salmon River,
and would be more appropriately a setting for a campus than a
prison. But this is how our society is nowadays: building more
prisons than colleges in most states. Since small communities
near New York City didn't want prisons, and since Malone is more
than 300 miles from The City, village officials were sure they
could lure prisons to their needy town.

Malone officials wooed businesses, lobbied
the State and won a big prize. The Franklin Correctional Facility
now has nearly 3,000 prisoners. Two years later, along came Bare
Hill Correctional Facility with almost 2,000 people behind those
bars. Malone was lovin' it! Bring on more bodies. So, New York
State obliged and last summer the Upstate Correctional Facility
opened and now houses 1,400 prisoners.

Today 20% of Malone's population of 20,000
are prisoners. The town is now a champion of multicultural diversity
with more than 90% of the combined prison-populations black and
Hispanic. The town of Malone is overwhelmingly white. Perhaps
there's an 'economic miracle' here since the influx of public
money (about $30,000 year/prisoner) means prison guards earn
some of the highest pay in Malone.

No, there are no miracles here. Not even close.
Most of the 750 jobs that the Upstate facilities brought to Malone
went to people from outside the town. Seniority rules, according
to Boyce Sherwin, director of the Office of Community Development
for Malone.

A hoped-for food processing plant to serve
the prisons hasn't materialized, the expanded sewage treatment
plant dumps increased amounts of nitrates into the Salmon River,
and there's more traffic congestion.

It gets worse. Taxes have gone up, and the
payments will be more than $1 million this year.

"What Malone got was the state's first
max-maxi prison for its most incorrigible prisoners. At Upstate
they spend 22 hours a day in lockdown, with two hours of recreation
in an outdoor cage. The town doesn't even have a YMCA, and the
only form of recreation is the bars," Sherwin told the press.

Prisons are surely not the long-term economic
answer for desperate rural towns. For Malone the dream turned
nightmare. Deploring the prison-construction boom, Sherwin and
others now ask if this is the legacy to our children. "Once
you have the reputation of a prison town, you won't become a
Fortune 500 company town, or an Internet or software company
town or even a diverse tourism town," says Ann Ruzow Holland
of Friends of the North Country, a community development group
that has opposed prison-building upstate.

So it goes across the United States. In northeastern
Washington State, very near the headquarters for The November
Coalition, the lure of 'prison money' for rural communities has
snagged the Colville Confederated Tribes. The tribal council
has plans underway to build a prison on seventy acres of land
in Nespelem, about 90 miles northwest of Spokane. The facility
will incarcerate men and women, up to 48 adults and 16 children
at a cost of $4.5 million. They need seventy acres for this?
What's next, prisoner-operated casinos?

Who in past times could foresee the totally-corrupting
power of the almighty dollar? Perhaps the Colville members and
communities nationwide should heed the lessons of social and
environmental failure from Malone's stillborn 'economic miracle'.